Vote swapping hits the U.K.

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By James Ledbetter

(IDG) -- With the U.K. general election about to be announced, a crop of vote-swapping Web sites has sprung up in recent weeks. They take after the "Nader trader" sites that emerged during last year's U.S. presidential election, through which supporters of Democrat Al Gore and Green Party nominee Ralph Nader agreed to trade votes to the strategic benefit of both.

The most prominent U.K. swapping site is Tacticalvoter.net, which went live in mid-April. Founder Jeff Buckley acknowledges that his partisan goal is to reduce the influence of the Conservative Party. Buckley said he was inspired by an article last autumn in the Times of London showing that 127 of the 165 incumbent Conservative MPs would have lost had the votes for opposition not been split between Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

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"Just around then," Buckley recalls, "the Nader trader sites started to come out, and I thought that it could work over here."

Another such site is VoteSwap 2001. Although it is ostensibly nonpartisan, founder Joe Vaitilingam says, "I recognize that vote swapping is a phenomenon most likely to benefit the left-of-center parties."

Even famed protest singer Billy Bragg has thrown his weight behind the effort. In an attempt to unseat Conservative MPs in the South and West Dorset constituencies, Bragg has established www.votedorset.net.

By itself, tactical voting to avoid splitting is not new to U.K. politics. In the 1997 general election, for example, Liberal Democrat Mark Oaten beat the Conservative candidate by just two votes out of about 60,000 cast. But in a by-election six months later, Oaten's victory margin ballooned to more than 20,000 votes. In essence, every voter who had voted against the Conservative candidate switched to the Liberal Democrat in order to preserve the seat.

That is a tactical vote, but it's still a step away from vote swapping. Vote swapping is perhaps the ultimate peer-to-peer application, in which two voters from separate districts agree to vote for each other's candidate. So, for example, a Labour supporter living in District A might agree to vote for a Liberal Democrat because Labour has no hope of winning in A -- on the condition that a counterpart in District B would vote Labour because the Liberal Democrats have no hope of winning in B.

Tacticalvoter's Buckley claims that more than 1,100 vote swaps have already been pledged through his Web site, and the number clearly will increase as the election nears. The site is targeting a total of 220 seats, and Buckley hopes to influence the outcome of as many as 15.

Some Conservatives have suggested that the practice is illegal. Indeed, the U.K.'s Electoral Commission is investigating Tacticalvoter.net. But the people behind the sites say they are confident that they are within the law. As with Napster or with dating sites, vote-swapping sites claim that they simply allow two consenting adults to make a private agreement. In the U.S., the state of California actually shut down two vote-swapping sites before the election. The lawsuit that ensued is still pending.

At the national level, neither Labour nor the Liberal Democrats will formally endorse vote swapping, but it's clear that the smaller Liberal Democratic Party is happy for the boost. Mark Pack, a political consultant who runs the Liberal Democrats' Web site, said, "We're very keen on getting as many people to vote Liberal Democrat as possible."

'Nader Traders' may have affected outcome in Florida
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Analysis: Internet lessons for Campaign 2004
November 15, 2000
Web site says vote auction was just a 'game'
November 10, 2000
Courts assail online vote-swap and auction sites
November 7, 2000
Embattled vote auction site returns to the Web
October 24, 2000
Vote-selling Web site to be revived, possibly offshore
August 24, 2000
Web site offering to sell votes shut down
August 23, 2000
Vote for sale?
August 17, 2000

Nader traders called traitors
(The Industry Standard)
ACLU takes up vote-swapping fight
(The Industry Standard)
Voteswap2000.com elects to shut down
(The Industry Standard)
Vote swapping for Gore
(The Industry Standard)
The election and the Internet
(The Industry Standard)
Voter.com to sell membership list
(The Industry Standard)
Web site says vote auction was just a game
(Computerworld)
Wanna buy my vote? Fuhgeddaboutit
(The Industry Standard)

Tacticalvoter.net
Votedorset.net

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